What if Walt Disney had produced the Looney Tunes franchise?/Walt Disney Animated Classics/Lady and the Tramp
Lady and the Tramp is a 1955 American animated romantic musical comedy-drama film produced by Walt Disney and released to theaters on June 22, 1955 by Buena Vista Distribution. The 18th Disney animated feature film, it was the first animated feature filmed in the CinemaScope widescreen film process. Lady and the Tramp tells the story of a female American Cocker Spaniel named Lady who lives with a refined, upper-middle-class family, and a male stray mongrel named Tramp. When the two dogs meet, they embark on many romantic adventures and fall in love. Lady and the Tramp was released to theaters on June 22, 1955 to box office success. It initially received mixed to negative reviews by film critics, but critical reception for the film has been generally positive in modern times, and the film is now seen as one of the best Disney animated films. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, the film features the voices of Barbara Luddy, Larry Roberts, Bill Thompson, Bill Baucom, Verna Felton, and Peggy Lee. A direct-to-video sequel, Lady and the Tramp II: Tramp's Children, was released on February 27, 2001. A live-action adaptation premiered on November 12, 2019 on Disney's streaming service Disney+. Plot On Christmas morning, 1909, in a quaint Midwestern town, a man named Jim Dear gives his wife Darling an American cocker spaniel puppy that she names Lady. Lady enjoys a happy life with the couple and befriends two local neighborhood dogs, Jock, a Scottish terrier, and Trusty, a bloodhound. Meanwhile, across town, a feral mongrel named Tramp lives on his own, dining on scraps from Tony's Italian restaurant and protecting his fellow strays from the local dogcatcher. One day, Lady is saddened after her owners begin treating her rather coldly. Jock and Trusty visit her and determine that their change in behavior is due to Darling expecting a baby. While Jock and Trusty try to explain her what a baby is, Tramp interrupts the conversation and offers his own thoughts on the matter, making Jock takes an immediate dislike to the stray and orders him out of the yard. As Tramp leaves, he reminds Lady that "when the baby moves in, the dog moves out". Eventually, the baby arrives and the couple introduces Lady to the infant, of whom Lady grown fond. Soon after, Jim Dear and Darling leave for a trip, with their Aunt Sarah looking after the baby and the house. Aunt Sarah, while loving to the baby, views Lady as a nuisance and even a threat to the child. Aunt Sarah's two trouble-making Siamese cats, Nip and Tuck,deliberately mess up the house, knowing Lady will get in trouble for it, and then get her in even more trouble by tricking Aunt Sarah into thinking that Lady attacked them. Aunt Sarah then takes Lady to a pet shop to get a muzzle. Terrified, Lady flees the pet shop but is pursued by a trio of stray dogs. Tramp manages to rescue her, fighting off the vicious strays. Seeing the muzzle on Lady's head, Tramp decides to take her to the local zoo, where they find a beaver who is able to remove the muzzle with his teeth. Later, Tramp shows Lady how he lives "footloose and collar-free", eventually leading into a candlelit dinner at Tony's. Lady begins to fall in love with Tramp, but she chooses to return home in order to watch over the baby. Tramp offers to escort Lady back home, but when Tramp decides to chase hens around a farmyard for fun, Lady is captured by the dog catcher and brought to the dog pound. While at the pound, the other dogs reveal to Lady that Tramp has had multiple girlfriends in the past, and they feel it is unlikely that he will ever settle down. Lady is eventually claimed by Aunt Sarah, who chains her in the backyard as punishment for running away. When Tramp arrives to apologize, Lady angrily lashes out at him about his past girlfriends and failure to rescue her from the pound. Tramp sadly leaves, but immediately thereafter a rat sneaks into the house. Lady sees the rat and barks frantically at it, but Aunt Sarah tells her to be quiet. Tramp hears her barking and rushes back, entering the house and cornering the rat in the nursery. Lady breaks free and rushes to the nursery, where Tramp inadvertently knocks over the baby's crib before ultimately killing the rat. The commotion alerts Aunt Sarah, who sees Tramp and believes he is responsible for attacking the baby. She pushes him in a closet and locks Lady in the basement, then calls the pound to take Tramp away. Jim Dear and Darling return home as the dog catcher departs, and when they release Lady, she leads them to the dead rat. Overhearing everything, Jock and Trusty chase after the dog catcher's wagon. The dogs are able to track down the wagon and scare the horses, causing the wagon to crash. Jim Dear arrives in a taxi with Lady, and she reunites with Tramp, but their joy is short-lived when they find Trusty pinned underneath the wagon's wheel, motionless, with Jock howling mournfully. That Christmas, Tramp has been adopted into the family, and he and Lady have started their own family, with two daughters and a son who look like Lady and a son who looks similar to Tramp. Jock comes to see the family along with Trusty, who is still alive and merely suffered a broken leg, which is still healing. Thanks to the puppies, Trusty has a fresh audience for his old stories about his Grandpappy Old Reliable, but he has forgotten them. Cast * Barbara Luddy as Lady * Larry Roberts as Tramp * Bill Thompson as Jock, Bull, Dachsie, Policeman, Joe * Bill Baucom as Trusty * Stan Freberg as the Beaver * Verna Felton as Aunt Sarah * Alan Reed as Boris * Peggy Lee as Darling, Peg * Thurl Ravenscroft as Alligator * George Givot as Tony * Dallas McKennon as Toughy, Pedro, Professor, Hyena * Lee Millar as Jim Dear, the Dogcatcher * Paul Winchell as Nip and Tuck * The Mellomen as Dog Chorus * Mel Blanc as the Stray Dogs Production Story development Lady and the Tramp was the third Disney animated feature to be an original story, rather than be based on an already existing work, after Headin’ South (1942) and Burro (1955). In 1937, Disney story man Joe Grant came up with an idea inspired by the antics of his English Springer Spaniel Lady, and how she got "shoved aside" by Joe's new baby. He approached Walt Disney with sketches of Lady. Disney enjoyed the sketches and commissioned Grant to start story development on a new animated feature titled Lady. Through the late 1930s and early 1940s, Joe Grant and other artists worked on the story, taking a variety of approaches, but Disney was not pleased with any of them, primarily because he thought Lady was too sweet, and there was not enough action. Walt Disney read a short story written by Ward Greene, "Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog", in Cosmopolitan magazine, published in 1945. He thought that Grant's story can be improved if Lady fell in love with a cynical dog character like the one in Greene's story, and hired Greene to collaborate with Grant in the film. The new dog character had various names during development, including Homer, Rags, and Bozo, before "Tramp" was chosen. The finished film is slightly different from what was originally planned. Lady was to have only one next-door neighbor, a Ralph Bellamy-type canine named Hubert. Hubert was later replaced with Jock and Trusty. Aunt Sarah was the traditional overbearing mother-in-law. In the final film, she is softened to a busybody who, though antagonistic towards Lady and Tramp, is well-meaning (it is mentioned that she sends a packet of dog biscuits to the dogs at Christmas to apologize for mistreating them). Originally, Lady's owners were called Jim Brown and Elizabeth. These were changed to highlight Lady's point of view. They were briefly referred to as "Mister" and "Missis" before settling on the names "Jim Dear" and "Darling". To maintain a dog's perspective, Darling and Jim's faces are rarely shown, similar to Mammy Two Shoes from Disney's Looney Tunes shorts starring Jerry Mouse and Tom Cat. The rat was a somewhat comic character in early sketches, but became a great deal more frightening, due to the need to raise dramatic tension. A scene created but then deleted was one in which after Trusty says "Everybody knows, a dog's best friend is his human", Tramp describes a world in which the roles of both dogs and humans are switched; the dogs are the masters and vice versa. There was a love triangle among Lady, Tramp, and a Russian wolfhound named Boris (who appears in the dog pound in the final version). The film's opening sequence, in which Darling unwraps a hat box on Christmas morning and finds Lady inside, is inspired by an incident when Walt Disney presented his wife Lily with a Chow puppy as a gift in a hat box to make up for having previously forgotten a dinner date with her. In 1949, Grant left the studio, yet Disney story men were continually pulling Grant's original drawings and story off the shelf to retool. A solid story began taking shape in 1953, based on Grant's storyboards and Greene's short story. Due to his absence, Grant did not receive film credit for his story work at all, an issue that animation director Eric Goldberg hoped to rectify in the Lady and the Tramp Platinum Edition's behind-the-scenes vignette that explained Grant's role. Singer Peggy Lee not only voiced two characters but co-wrote six songs for the film. Animation As they had done with deer on Bambi, the animators studied many dogs of different breeds to capture the movement and personality of dogs. Although the spaghetti eating sequence is probably now the best known scene from the film, Walt Disney was prepared to cut it, thinking that it would not be romantic and that dogs eating spaghetti would look silly. Animator Frank Thomas was against Walt's decision and animated the entire scene himself without any lay-outs. Walt was impressed by Thomas's work and how he romanticized the scene and kept the scene in. On viewing the first take of the scene, the animators felt that the action should be slowed down, so an apprentice trainee was assigned to create "half numbers" in between many of the original frames. Originally, the background artist was supposed to be Mary Blair and she did some inspirational sketches for the film. However, she left the studio to become a children's book illustrator in 1953. Claude Coats was then appointed as the key background artist. Coats made models of the interiors of Jim Dear and Darling's house, and shot photos and film at a low perspective as reference to maintain a dog's view. Eyvind Earle (who later became the art director of Disney's Sleeping Beauty) did almost 50 miniature concept sketches for the Bella Notte sequence and was a key contributor to the film. CinemaScope Originally, Lady and the Tramp was planned to be filmed in a regular full frame aspect ratio. However, due to the growing interest of widescreen film among movie-goers, Disney decided to animate the film in CinemaScope making Lady and the Tramp the first animated feature filmed in the process. This new innovation presented additional problems for the animators: the expansion of space created more realism but gave fewer closeups. It also made it difficult for a single character to dominate the screen so that groups had to be spread out to keep the screen from appearing sparse. Longer takes become necessary since constant jump-cutting would seem too busy or annoying. Layout artists essentially had to reinvent their technique. Animators had to remember that they had to move their characters across a background instead of the background passing behind them. Yet the animators overcame these obstacles during the action scenes, such as Tramp killing the rat. More problems arose as the premiere date got closer since not all theaters had the capability to show CinemaScope at the time. Upon learning this, Walt issued two versions of the film: one in widescreen, and another in the Academy ratio. This involved gathering the layout artists to restructure key scenes when characters were on the edges of the screen. Release Home media Release and reception Box-office and critical reception The film was originally released in theaters on June 22, 1955. At the time, the film took in a higher figure than any other Disney animated feature since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, earning an estimated $7.5 million in rentals at the North American box office in 1955. Two episodes of Disneyland on the production of the film, one called "A Story of Dogs" and the other called "Cavalcade of Songs", aired before the film's release. The film was also reissued to theaters in 1962, 1971, 1980, and 1986. Lady and the Tramp also played a limited engagement in select Cinemark Theaters from February 16-18, 2013. Despite being an enormous success at the box office, the film was initially panned by critics during its initial release. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times claimed the film was "not the best Disney has done in this line. The sentimentality is mighty, and the CinemaScope size does not make for any less aware of the thickness of the goo. It also magnifies the animation, so that the flaws and poor foreshortening are more plain. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, the artists' work is below par in this film." Time wrote "Walt Disney has for so long parlayed gooey sentiment and stark horror into profitable cartoons that most moviegoers are apt to be more surprised than disappointed to discover that the combination somehow does not work this time." However, Variety deemed the film "a delight for the juveniles and a joy for adults". However, the film has since gone on to become regarded as a classic. Dave Kehr, writing for The Chicago Tribune gave the film four stars. Animation historian Charles Solomon praised the film. The sequence of Lady and Tramp sharing a plate of spaghetti — climaxed by an accidental kiss as they swallow opposite ends of the same strand of spaghetti — is considered an iconic scene in American film history. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that the film received a 93% approval rating, with an average rating of 7.7/10, based on 40 reviews. The website's consensus states, "A nostalgic charmer, Lady and the Tramp's token sweetness is mighty but the songs and richly colored animation are technically superb and make for a memorable experience." Lady and the Tramp was named number 95 out of the "100 Greatest Love Stories of All Time" by the American Film Institute in their 100 Years...100 Passions special, as one of only two animated films to appear on the list, along with Disney's Beauty and the Beast which ranked 34th. In 2010, Rhapsody called its accompanying soundtrack one of the all-time great Disney and Pixar soundtracks. In June 2011, TIME named it one of "The 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films". Character criticism The characters Nip and Tuck were criticized the most for their racial stereotyping of Asians/Asian-Americans. Other criticisms of racial stereotyping included Italians (Tony and Joe) and Mexicans (The Mexican-accented chihuahua). Accolades American Film Institute Lists * AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – Nominated * AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions – No. 95 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs: ** He's a Tramp – Nominated * AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals – Nominated * AFI's 10 Top 10 – Nominated Animated Film Music Track listing Sequel Live-action adaptation Trivia *Thurl Ravenscroft, who provided the voice of the Alligator, also voiced the Captain in One Hundred and One Dalamtians and Billy Boss in The Aristocats. *The crazy laugh of the Hyena, provided by Dallas McKennon, was later used as a stock sound effect for crazy laughter, specifically the laughing hyenas in the "it's a small world" attraction. It was also heard in the 1979 horror film Tourist Trap, Jon Favreau's 2003 Christmas comedy film Elf, and as the original voice of Ripper Roo in the Crash Bandicoot video game franchise.